It is a totally specious argument that has zero merit.
It reminds me of the disgusting and flagrantly ridiculous thread from Stephen Diehl that was on HN recently, more comments here:
It reminds me of the disgusting and flagrantly ridiculous thread from Stephen Diehl that was on HN recently, more comments here:
The amount of energy used by bitcoin is many zeros larger than any of the examples listed and is used by a group of people many zeros smaller than any of the demographics mentioned. This is a pretty easy case to argue objectively, particularly because there are alternatives to proof of work, but they aren't as sexy as running a server farm full of FPGAs, GPUs, and ASICs.